“We have confirmed through early analysis that the device is fabricated at Samsung’s Foundry. We suspect we will see Samsung’s 28 nm Hi K metal Gate (HKMG) being used.”

But wait! It turns out that the A7?s “gate pitch” — the distance between each transistor — is 114 nm, compared to the A6?s 123 nm.

This change means the same computing power but in 77% of the original area

iFixit also did close examination of the M7 co-processor:

The M7 is an NXP LPC18A1, part of the LPC1800 series of high-performing ARM Cortex-M3 based micro controllers; reduces power consumption as it is dedicated to processing accelerometer, gyroscope and compass data

Here’s what it looks like:

The team also took the iSight camera, Wi-Fi module and LTE modem under the electron microscope. Check out their full findings here.